


Two Women, Talking

by Nell65



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a slightly different world, one in which our fugitives took a different -- slower, sneakier, stealthier -- path to rural China, I like to think that Kono Kalakaua and Doris McGarrett had the time to become friends. That they might have had the time to have these conversations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Conversation One

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks as alwasy to sk - who reads with an attentiveness and care that astound me still, and for which I am forever grateful - and Ms Artisan - who continues to give me feedback my H50 stories with enthusiasm and patience.

_Conversation One_

“Do you ever regret it?” Kono asked.

Doris raised her eyebrows as she huffed a faint laugh. “It? Singular? Oh, honey. I regret so many things I wouldn’t know where to begin.” She grimaced and gave her head a quick shake as she reached for the coffee pot. “Maybe with that final round of sake last night.”

Kono ducked her head with a snort of agreement. Adam had refused to get up this morning, still nursing his own regrets over the sake. “Okay. Bad question.” She thought for a moment. “How did you get started, down this path?”

Doris shrugged, dumping a heaping spoonful of sugar into her coffee and stirring vigorously. “Paths branch, kiddo. But, if you’re asking me how everything began, well…. Hmm.” 

Doris was quiet, looking at her hands cradling the small porcelain cup. Kono began to think she would brush the question off, when she took a deep breath, looked up and said, “I think it began because I wanted to be Modesty Blaise.”

The reference baffled Kono for a moment, until she finally placed it. Then she couldn’t decide if Doris was serious, or just shitting with her. “From the comic strip?”

“Yep.” Doris grinned. “The very same. Are you familiar with her?”

“Only a few images. Piled dark hair, big, pointy boobs, lots of leather. And cars. She was some kind of secret agent?” 

Doris’s grin grew wider. “Yeah. That’s her.”

It seemed more and more like Doris was serious. That once, long ago, Doris had been a kid who wanted to grow up to be a sexy lady James Bond. Who would have imagined that? Or, upon further reflection, Kono realized, perhaps a better question was, how could any of them have missed it? “So, how did you go from wanting to being?”

“Well,” Doris’s grin definitely took on a sardonic edge, “I never did get the boobs. Or a Willie Garvin of my own.”

“Okay. Funny.” Kono had no idea who Willie Garvin was or why he mattered, but from Doris’s offhand tone, he sounded more like a sidekick than a lover, so she let it pass.

“This part is boring family history. Sure you want it?”

“Yes.” 

“Okay. My dad was an army officer, stationed in Seoul, South Korea in late 1949. He was there when North Korea invaded in 1950. He survived the rout, running south for Pusan along with everyone else.” Doris paused, and added, “I was born while it was all going on. My mother had no idea if my father had made it when she brought me home from the hospital.”

“Rough.”

“She was an army wife.” Doris shrugged matter-of-factly. “And, he survived. Yay!” Doris flashed a quick smile, “But, on that panicked retreat, he picked up a lot of Korean. Surprisingly quickly for a white guy. Turned out he had an ear for Asian languages. When his tour was up, he left the Army, got a PhD, and became a professor. At George Washington, in D.C.”

“Impressive!” Kono wasn’t sure if she meant it was impressive that Doris’s father had survived the first phase of the war in Korea, or been good at Asian languages, or became a professor. But ‘impressive’ seemed to cover all of the above.

“Mmm.” Doris nodded and took another sip of her coffee, apparently somewhat less impressed by her father than Kono was. 

After she set her cup down, Doris continued, “Given his background, you shouldn’t be shocked to learn that he did a lot of consulting. Army, State, DOD, CIA.”

“No.” It wouldn’t have been the first thing Kono thought of, but it made sense. “Not shocked.”

“It all seemed terribly glamorous to me.” Doris looked up and winked, “and a stepping-stone to becoming Modesty Blaise. With his help, I got an internship with the State Department the summer before I was headed up to Wellesley. Dad had taken us to Korea several times while I was growing up, twice for a big chunk of the school year. So I spoke Korean well, Chinese acceptably, and had a smattering of Vietnamese and Japanese. The State Department, seeing all that, sent me back to Seoul, to intern in the cultural affairs office at the Embassy there.”

Doris paused again, her eyes looking at something far away and long ago. Kono kept still.

“It was 1967. The world was staring to burn. I was no hippie. I believed in the American Dream. I believed that we were involved in a titanic struggle, east and west, tyranny and freedom. I believed we lived under constant threat of nuclear Armageddon. I believed all of it; with all the fervor my teenage self could muster.” 

Doris shook her head for her teenage self, sipping at her coffee and chuckling under her breath. Looking up with a twinkle in her eye, she asked, “Ever seen those old news clips of girls shrieking for the Beatles?” 

Kono nodded. “Yeah.”

“That was me. Only for the U.S. of A. Cold Warrior all the way.” 

Doris paused to sip at her coffee again, gazing unseeing out the window of the small restaurant attached to the pension where they had spent the night. Kono tried to imagine waves of shrieking teenage fangirls fainting at the sight of..., and that was where her imagination shuddered to a halt. She couldn’t even imagine what the patriotic equivalent of the Beatles might be. 

Doris set her cup down, dark humor back in her eyes. “I was so damn young. And so easy to recruit.”

It was the only possible option in that time and place. “CIA?”

“CIA.”

“Did you come home and go to college?”

“No. I did my level best to become Modesty Blaise. Only the American version.”

“I bet you were good at it.”

Doris nodded. “Damn good.”

Kono shook her head. No false modesty here. Steve apparently came by this trait honestly.

“I worked all over Asia for the next six years or so. I loved it, especially the first four, maybe five of them. By then it was the early seventies, though, and the world was changing again. Watergate happened. We lost the war in Vietnam…,” Doris’s eyes were distant again and sad this time, and Kono wondered how many people she’d known who died. Then Doris’s mouth twisted into a regretful scowl, “Which, in hindsight, appears to have been a colossal mistake. And so it became clear to me that foreign policy makers in Washington were paying no attention at all to what people in the field were telling them.” Doris’s expression turned fierce and anger leaked into her voice. “Good agents fought and died to bring in actionable intelligence and, nothing. Nada. Bupkiss. Same stupid mistakes, same stupid orders. I shot my mouth off to the wrong people,” she caught Kono’s eyes and opened her hands and eyes wide, “Surprise!”

Kono chuckled encouragingly, because, really, very little would be less surprising.

“After that I found myself on more difficult missions, doing more dangerous, complicated things. Bad stuff went down. I became a feminist. And, finally, a hippie. Or, the CIA version of the same.” She rolled her eyes, once again gently mocking her past self. “I got reassigned to a desk job in Honolulu in late 1974.”

“That’s where you met Steve’s dad?”

“Yep.” Doris’s smile turned gentle and full of delight. “He was handsome as could be, a Vietnam vet, about eight years older than me. He was still in uniform, on the street, ticketing my car day after day. It took him a while to figure out I was doing it on purpose. Eventually he asked me out for coffee.”

“And you fell in love.”

Doris’s smile faded and she was quiet for a time. At last she said, “He fell in love. I fell in love with the idea of falling in love, quitting the CIA, playing house, having babies, gardening, knitting, decoupage, getting involved with the women’s movement, finally getting a college degree…”

Kono got stuck on the one thing that didn’t seem to fit. “Decoupage?”

Doris laughed again, and waved her hand dismissively. “It was a thing. It was the seventies. You shellacked paper cutouts or photographs onto, well, everything that couldn’t run away. Back in her stand up days, Rosanne Barr had a bit about decoupaging her husband because he never moved from in front of the T.V. I laughed so hard I pissed myself the first time I heard it.” Doris laughed heartily again, in memory. Though of decoupage, Rosanne Barr, or John McGarrett, it was impossible to say.

Kono wasn’t interested in weird 1970s decorating habits. Or Rosanne Barr. “So. You married him.”

“Yes.” Doris nodded. “I married him. Quit the CIA. Moved into our cute little bungalow, and threw myself into my new life.” 

Kono wasn’t aware of making a sound, but Doris shot her a sharp-eyed glance and waved an admonishing finger at her. “Don’t look so judgmental, Kono. I wife-d the hell out of John McGarrett. Perfect meals, spotless house, charming hostess, tiger in the sack. I wanted him to be as happy as I was. And I was happy. So, so was he.” Her voice softened again. “In my memory, that time is always bright, sparkling with sun and laughter and flowers.”

This time, Kono didn’t interrupt.

“The babies came, they were beautiful. John made detective. I started classes at the university. In fact I was part of one of the early day-care collectives on campus. Still one of the things I’m proudest of. Getting the University of Hawaii to provide child care for students.”

Kono could help but grin at Doris’s triumphantly satisfied smirk. “Go you!”

“The personal is political, baby.” Doris grinned back, bumping Kono’s raised fist with her own. Then her smile faded and she took up her story again. “The glow started to come off about the time Mary started school. I’d finished my degree. In Asian studies, natch. John was gone most of the time on cases, fantastic cases. He was doing brilliantly. But it meant I was more or less a single parent. I got lonely. And bored. And frustrated. So I volunteered everywhere and started talking about looking for a part time job.”

Doris paused and refilled her coffee. Looking back up, she continued, “Someone must have been watching and waiting, because I’d no more than admitted it, in my heart, that I was unhappy and lost, when the CIA came calling again.”

Kono had no difficulty at all imagining a bored, restless, high-energy Doris McGarrett, kids at school, husband on the job, time hanging heavy on her hands. “An easy mark.”

“All over again. New verse, same as the first.”

Doris looked directly at Kono then. “If I have one thing I could do over, it would be that. I would turn them down.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t.”

After another pause she went on, “I was doing analyst work, I refused to do anything that would endanger my family, or require me to leave Honolulu. For a while, that was good. The part that sucked was that John couldn’t know. He thought I was a part-time secretary.”

“Did he believe that?”

“Yes. Given how everything turned out in the end, I know I fooled him. Completely.” Doris’s expression turned rueful. “That’s another regret. A big one. Though,” her frown deepened into a scowl, “it also irritates the hell out of me. How could he have not known? Was he really paying so little attention to me?” She sighed deeply, then shook herself out of whatever memories were surfacing with a wry smile. “Actually, it seems that there are a whole lotta regrets right there, missy. And none of them any of your business.”

Kono accepted that door closing, and returned to the main thread of the story. “You didn’t stay an analyst.”

“No. I still wouldn’t leave Hawaii, so I became a case manager, a handler. A desk jockey. I swore I wouldn’t make the same mistakes as all those stupid fuckups in DC, back when I was in the field.”

“But?”

“But I did. And it came back to bite me in the ass. So fucking hard.”

Kono knew Doris had to be talking about the events that led up to her faked death. “Wo Fat.”

“Is part of all that. Yes.”

“You’re still not going to tell me what all went down, are you.”

“No. I haven’t told Steve, who has more right to know than anyone. I’m definitely not going to tell you.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“Told Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“They aren’t my secrets, Kono. They are state secrets. Matters of national security. Not just information I’m holding back to be mean to Steve.” Doris expression was earnest and sincere, and faintly admonishing as well. “I took oaths, made promises. Stars in my eyes, yes, but, steel too. There’s a part of me that still believes in all that crazy patriotic stuff I believed when I was seventeen. I really do believe that what I gave up most of my adult life for, matters. There is also still stuff I don’t fully know, about who and how and why. Steve, being his father’s son, and mine, won’t stop until he has it all. Or dies trying. The only way I can see to prevent that is to give him nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Even if he hates you?”

“He doesn’t hate me. He loves me. That’s what makes it hurt so bad.”

That was entirely too blithely perceptive to be comfortable, Kono thought. Especially because it seemed really clear to her, if not to Doris, that the sentiment was not returned in exactly the same way. Not that she doubted that Doris loved her son, exactly. But what that meant to Doris and what Steve wished it meant seemed to be two such different things they might as well be in different universes. “Is that why you stayed dead as long as you did?”

“I’d’ve stayed dead until I really died, if it’d been up to me. But Steve pushed so hard that others thought that my coming in from the cold was the only chance of slowing him down.”

To Kono’s surprise, somehow she was more shocked by this than anything Doris had said yet, and she knew Doris heard the faint gasp under the question, “You would have stayed dead?”

Doris took on the pinched and brittle aura Kono had so often seen after another confrontation with Steve. She pushed aside her empty cup and rose, brushing off her hands. “Peace and ignorance seemed the only gifts I could give my children. Now they don’t even have that. There’s another regret for you.”

Kono stood as well, accepting that this conversation was over.


	2. Conversation Two

_Conversation Two_

“Your turn.” Doris sat down beside Kono, dangling her own legs over the small dock. “Why did you run with Adam?” She raised her brow and added, “and don’t tell me ‘true love.’ He didn’t expect you to come with him, and neither did anyone else.”

“Okay. Fair enough.” Kono was quiet, getting her thoughts in order. She’d been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after her long chat with Doris a week or more earlier, so it wasn’t too hard to begin. “You might understand more than anyone else, actually. I had one life, surfing, and it ended. After a few years of flailing around and being miserable, I finished college and went to the police academy, figured I’d follow along in the family business. And ended up with Five-O before I’d even worn my uniform once. It seemed like an amazing opportunity. And, don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved almost all of it. But….”

Doris nodded understandingly, sympathy in her eyes. “But. It’s a dead end, career wise.”

“Yeah.” Kono tossed a small twig into the water and watched it begin to drift slowly away, struggling not to succumb to an attack of emo metaphor. “I started looking ahead, ten years, fifteen years out…. All I could see, if I stayed with Five-O is more of the same. Assuming for a minute that we managed to go that long with none of us getting hurt too bad, or, worse, killed on the job. Just me, running after the guys. No room for anything else, but nothing to reach for either.” She laughed ruefully, “I mean, it’s not like Steve is going anywhere, or Chin or Danny. And I don’t want them too, but, as long as they’re there – I’m always the youngest. Chin Ho Kelly’s little cousin.”

“Yep.” Doris nodded vigorously, sympathy in her eyes. “That was your bind.”

“I should have turned Steve down, I realize now. Done my time in uniform, on patrol, walked the beat. Earned my promotions. I would have had a whole department worth of options and transferrable skills, opportunities to lead. Instead, well, I have a rep for high risk, high violence, and low respect for procedure. Not great calling cards for transfer. I mean, I couldn’t do the kind of thing Danny did, move across the country and expect to get a job on another regular police force.”

Doris raised a teasing eyebrow. “You planning a move across country?”

Kono laughed. “No! I don’t want to leave the island, actually. Or, well,” she waved away Doris’s ‘oh really’ expression, “not forever.”

Doris examined her thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “You could get a job with the Feds. I’m sure you’d have no trouble being accepted to Quantico.”

Kono was truly taken aback. This had never drifted across her horizon as even a distant option. “FBI? Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Doris smiled at her. “You have all the qualifications. You’re old enough, have a college degree, and three years with Five-O. I know Steve would write you a glowing recommendation. They’d be lucky to get you.”

Kono felt her cheeks heating with the unexpected praise. “Yeah. Maybe. But the whole, not leaving the islands?”

“Okay. That would be a problem,” Doris conceded with a half smile.

“Besides,” Kono shook her head, banishing an image of herself in a well-fitted dark suit, badge at her belt, gun in her hand, feeling a sting of regret for a missed opportunity she hadn’t realized she had. “I only had a chance. Now? Now I’m on the run with a disgraced Yakuza boss. No job with the Feds in my future.”

Her dismissive laugh didn’t quite cover up a hint of bitterness. Not to her own ears, nor, she was certain, to Doris’s sharper ones.

“Hmm.” Doris narrowed her eyes and watched Kono carefully, not unlike a cat at a mouse hole Kono thought. “CIA?”

Kono relaxed and rolled her eyes. That was out of the question, and brought up no appealing images nor any feeling but mild amusement. “Seriously? After knowing your story? Um. No!” 

“Seriously. They’d love to have someone like you.”

“Yakuza Boss? On the run?” 

“Field officers are extremely flexible in their approach to recruiting. Very results oriented people. You have languages, skills and contacts. And a lovely, difficult to place face. You would look ‘at home’ almost anywhere.” 

Kono was so nonplused she had nothing to say.

“But,” Doris went on after it was clear Kono had no response, “if you want traditional things, a family, kids, a spouse….”

“I’m still not sure if I do. But… I’m not sure I don’t either!” Kono was faintly embarrassed by how close to a wail that sounded. She consciously got control of her voice and breathing before adding, “I’d like to leave that possibility open.” Then she sighed, “That’s another reason staying on the bottom rung with Five-O for the long haul is pretty unappealing. Families haven’t been safe. At all.”

Doris nodded, and she and Kono sat quietly for a spell. Kono wondered if, like she was, Doris was also remembering Malia’s murder, the times Grace had been in danger, all the times Steve’s house had been shot up, maybe even John McGarrett’s death three years ago. Doris eventually heaved a deep sigh. “No. They haven’t.” She turned her head to pin Kono with another pointed glance, “But…”

“Yeah. Okay.” Kono waved her hands, yielding to Doris’s insistence in sticking to the main subject. “So, jumping off with Adam wasn’t necessarily the solution to any of those problems.”

“No. Not so much.” Doris was definitely laughing at her now, on the inside anyway. “So. Why?”

There it was again. Why did she run with Adam. She’d tried to answer already, but somehow got lost in her regrets over Five-O. So, she tried again. “Standing there. On the dock, waiting for Adam to leave, I thought – what if? What if I regret this for the rest of my life? Would I always wonder what might have come if I didn’t take the leap? Seize the chance for romance and adventure and breaking all the ties that bind? And Chin. He saw it. Understood. Told me to grab on with both hands.”

Doris nodded understandingly, then her expression turned faintly sly, “And? Any regrets?”

“About running with Adam? Nope. None.” Kono grinned, then sobered. “I’m not blind. I don’t think this is going to end well. Adam is truly stuck. His only chance to save his ass if he goes back to the Yakuza, does his penance, and gets with the program. Or, turns on them completely. Which, well, he isn’t prepared to do. Because that’s just not who he is. So for now, all I’ve got is – seize the day. Live every one like it might be the last.”


	3. Conversation Three

_Conversation Three_

Doris looked up as Kono came stomping into the small kitchen yard. After watching her pick up about a dozen small utensils and then set them down again, all the while sporting a glower strong enough to power an electrical storm, she sighed. Kids. What are you going to do? “Sit down,” she said, pointing to a small stool. “I’ll make some tea.”

“I don’t want tea.”

“Yes. You do.” Doris picked up the kettle and filled it from the filtered water dispenser. “You also want to tell me what’s wrong.”

“No! I don’t!” Kono exclaimed, loudly. Then she seemed to hear herself, and grinned shamefacedly. “Okay.” She sat down. “I do. Want to tell you.”

Doris prepared the tea, and waited for Kono to begin. Something she was obviously having trouble with, fidgeting on the stool, biting her lip, playing with her folding knife. 

Doris waited for the water to heat, and said nothing.

When she finally drew up a stool to sit near Kono and the tea tray, Kono shook herself out of the reverie she’d fallen in to and accepted the cup Doris offered.

After blowing on her tea and taking a small sip, she began. “Growing up, I always thought of the women’s movement, of feminism, as a white lady thing. A haole thing.” She offered Doris a mildly apologetic shrug. “Something that didn’t have much of anything to do with me.”

“Fair enough. It’s a reasonable criticism of the movement. Especially in the U.S.”

“And, I was born in the eighties, you know? Women could vote, go to college, get whatever jobs they wanted. Be cops, doctors, soldiers,” she shot Doris a sly look, “Modesty Blaise. Whatever. It was all done, right?”

Doris shook her head, but didn’t try to hide her smile. “Young women, especially the pretty and successful ones, often think that. There’s an obvious explanation, if you want it.”

“Yeah.” Kono grimaced. “I think I’m already working that out for myself, thanks.”

After a moment she went on, “But it wasn’t done. Isn’t done. At all.”

“No.” Doris agreed. “It isn’t. Several millennia of cultural and political practices and assumptions can’t be undone and redone in a generation or three. Not even by pretty, privileged white ladies. Who carry their own baggage and wear their own blinders, just like everyone else.”

“Hmmph.” Kono scowled.

“So,” Doris asked, “What’s got you re-thinking your assumptions about feminism?”

“Adam. This,” Kono waved around the kitchen yard, but Doris was sure that she meant far more than this one small, outdoor kitchen, with broken tile, badly mended furniture, and exposed, electrical-fire-waiting-to-happen wiring.

Doris waited.

“The first few times we let people assume Adam and I were married, it was no big deal. Right? A cover that made things easier.”

“Yes.”

“But when I insisted we try without it, shit got hard. Real hard.”

Doris, vividly remembering the bar-brawl that had resulted from one of those experiments, nodded and made an affirming murmur. At least they had all learned that Adam had wonderfully quick instincts as a knife fighter. She had been working with him to improve on those ever since.

Kono sighed. “People really don’t like unattached women.”

“No. They don’t.” Doris kept her editorializing ‘young women’ to herself. Baby steps.

“And that sucks. Hard.” Kono scowled again. “Why should I have to be formally partnered with some guy in order to go about my own business?”

“Well. There’s a reason we called it ‘Women’s Liberation.’ Back in the day.” 

“Huh. Women’s libbers.” Kono rocked back with a grin as she made the connection. “I’d always wondered where that name came from. I thought it had something to do with ‘liberal’….”

Doris shook her head and laughed. “Trading that name in for Feminism made some sense, at the time, but looking back, I think it was, maybe, a mistake.” Not wanting to take this detour, Doris continued, “Anyway, feminists, or women’s libbers, would say that you shouldn’t have to be formally partnered with a dude.”

“Yeah.” Kono’s grin turned into a scowl. “I’m starting to see their point. And how it applies to me.”

Doris waited.

“So, I’ve been letting the wife thing happen.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Which would be fine, as a cover. Only,” Kono sighed hugely, “only, Adam gets this look in his eye. All warm and satisfied.”

Doris made another affirming noise. She knew exactly what Kono was talking about. She’d seen the same thing. Had known it would happen and was both resigned and tickled when it did. Watching Adam struggle not to let Kono see how puffed out with pride being her ‘husband’ made him had been amusing her for weeks now.

“He loves it!” Kono burst out. “He loves the idea. He loves knowing that claiming me like that gives him status and me safe passage.”

“Men do. Even the good ones. All their training and conditioning tells them to feel that way.”

“Yeah.” Kono laughed then. “He knows better than to ever say anything. But I can tell he wants too. So freaking bad.”

“I know, because I was there, in the seventies, that there is a whole school of thought about openness and honesty. But, for what it’s worth, I think you’ve both chosen wisely in not having a conversation about this. At least, not right now.” Doris knew her attitude about this was completely self-serving. But, she also knew, from experiments gone badly awry, that sometimes openness and honesty have no bottom, and some wells are best left untapped. Because they can never be resealed safely and permanently. This issue of a future between Adam and Kono seemed to her to be exactly that sort of topic.

Kono looked extremely doubtful. “Maybe.”

“And, also for what it’s worth, the older you are, the less anyone cares about your status with regard to dudes. I’m so old these days I’m practically invisible. Even in places where you would think I’d stand out like a sore thumb.” Doris waved her had around the yard, taking in the ramshackle buildings clustered in a poor neighborhood in a middling city that saw few foreign visitors each year. “It’s a useful asset, actually, in my line of work,” she chuckled. 

“Maiden, wife, crone, yeah?”

“Yeah. I was once certain I would never be a crone. That along with my generation, I could break that old paradigm. It turned out to be far more deeply rooted that we ever realized. But,” Doris shrugged and smiled ruefully, “eventually, I learned that invisibility carries with it its own kind of magic power.”


	4. Conversation Four

Kono frowned. Across the busy market, Doris bent her head to listen attentively to a wizened little old man muttering into her ear. 

This was the fourth time in as many days that Doris had been approached as they moved through the crowded back streets of Macau. A hand plucking anxiously at a sleeve, a frantic waist high wave out of the corner of an eye, followed by an urgently whispered conversation in a shadowed doorway, out of hearing, out of sight. 

Kono wondered how many such conversations she hadn’t witnessed. Thinking back, she began to suspect that they’d been happening all along. Ever since they finally started moving across the mainland after they arrived in Haiphong several weeks ago. 

“Have you been seeing this?” she asked Adam, nodding her head in Doris’s direction.

“Yeah.” He frowned. “Fifth time since we got to Macau. Not counting all the ones we haven’t noticed.”

“Fifth?” Kono made a face. “I’ve only seen four.”

Adam laughed. “Is this a competition?”

She cut him an evil side-eye. “Everything is a competition.” 

He draped his arm across her shoulders and pulled her close to kiss her temple. “Good thing you win most of them, then.”

She smiled, mollified though still peeved with herself, and pressed a quick kiss of thanks to his lips. Sitting up, she cast her glance back to Doris, who was now speaking to her informant. “That’s a pretty damn amazing network she’s running,” Kono observed.

“No shit,” Adam nodded his head in agreement and admiration. “A lifetime’s work.”

“And something’s got it buzzing.”

Doris straightened up and her informant disappeared into the market crowd. Kono and Adam watched her as she drifted back across the little market place, gradually making her way toward the small café stall where they sat, sipping coffee.

“I think we’re going to be on our own soon,” Adam said.

“Very soon,” Kono said, now that Doris was close enough she could see her face. It was what Kono had nicknamed her ‘Modesty Blaise’ face. Her secret agent face. Her spy face.

Smooth, bright, curious, mildly confused. The expression on the face of every white tourist they’d ever seen.

Doris had a killer ‘nice white lady’ act. Born in the Washington DC of her youth, refined in the diplomatic circles that provided her cover in her early twenties, honed to a razor’s edge in the PTA politics of the Honolulu public schools. She dressed it up – wealthy lady tourist – or down – hippie dippy world traveler – depending on the situation.

Doris pulled up a chair and sat down, signaling the waiter and ordering a coffee for herself in a deliberately mangled version of the local dialect. She was deep in hippie ex-pat mode right now.

“So kids,” she said, smiling brightly at them, “Do you think you’re ready to fly on your own?”

Also? Doris did NOT believe in beating around the bush when it came to bad news.

“Yes,” Kono said, almost at the same time as Adam’s “Of course.”

“Why?” Kono added. “You have somewhere to be?”

“As a matter of fact,” Doris grinned, “I do!”

Kono raised her brow.

Doris smirked and shook her head, somewhere between admonishment and affection. “I’ve just heard about this most amazing workshop and spiritual retreat. In the mountains, hosted at an extraordinary little monastery. Too small to have ever been destroyed, so it’s perfectly preserved!”

“Oh,” Adam frowned thoughtfully. “That really doesn’t sound like our sort of thing at all.”

“No!” Doris laughed. “I didn’t think it would be. So I made a reservation just for myself. The bus leaves soon though, so I’m off to pick up my bags.”

Kono couldn’t help it. She glared a little as she asked quietly, “What should we tell Steve?”

The bright light in Doris’s eyes faded just a bit and her shoulders drooped slightly. “You may see him before I do, it’s true. Tell him I love him.”

“What?” Kono hissed, shock making her sound angrier than she was. “Before you?”

“A spiritual journey tends to meander and short cuts turn out to be long,” Doris said, sounding like a cross between a fortune cookie and something you’d find poorly cross-stitched on a burlap pillow at weekend craft show.

Adam put his hand on Kono’s arm, warning and reassurance both. To Doris, he said, “I’m sure you’ll beat us home if you can.”

Doris dropped her eyes for a moment, then looked up. Directly at Kono. All of her ditsy persona vanished and Doris McGarrett, all brittle edges and steel-cord spine back in charge. “I don’t think so. Not this time. There is something in the wind. Something’s coming. Big. It stinks. It won’t be diffused easily or quickly. But doing that? Is my life’s work.”

“Doris…” Kono started to protest again, but wilted at the expression on Doris’s face. Pain, pride, determination, regret, and something Kono hoped like hell was love. 

“Tell him I love him. Tell MaryAnn to check our dead drop.” She stood up and, to Kono’s surprise, bent and firmly, gently kissed each of them on the forehead. A benediction. A blessing. Possibly a curse. 

She stepped back and said, “Keep each other safe.”

And then she was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me a long time to finish this, but it niggled just enough that I couldn't let it go.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this series last summer, thinking that on a 'slow boat to China,' Doris and Kono might have a chance to get to know one another, and I wondered what might come of that. It turned it to be the fastest tramp frieghter trip across the Pacific in human history (seriously, was there a Tardis in there?), and my imagination faltered in the face of an entirely AR construct. But I decided I'd rather share these with the (few, the intrepid) Doris McGarrett and (many more) Kono Kalakaua fans that are out there than let them wither on my hard drive.


End file.
